How to force Full Hardware Inventory on SCCM Clients

In this post we will see how to force full hardware inventory on SCCM clients. Hardware inventory is an interesting feature in configuration manager. When you configure hardware inventory, it collects information about the hardware configuration of client devices in your organization. Hardware inventory settings are located in the client settings. In other words Enable hardware inventory on clients setting must be enabled in client settings. Most of all the SCCM client agent should be installed and running fine. Hardware inventory runs on clients according to the schedule that you specify in client settings.

Once the hardware inventory is enabled, client runs the hardware inventory cycle. Hardware inventory action cycle is listed under configuration manager client properties. Then the client sends the collected inventory information to a management point. The management point then forwards the inventory information to site server which stores the inventory information in the site database.

As mentioned earlier Hardware inventory cycle can be initiated manually on the client computers. Also there are various scripts to enable the hardware inventory on sccm clients. In this post I will be using a wonderful tool called Right click tools by nowmicro. It’s a very good tool and comes with lot of features which makes the tasks easier. I will not be discussing features of this tool rather let’s see how we can use it.

This will bring up the hardware inventory cycle window. Click Yes to perform a full hardware inventory cycle.

If the collection contains lot of devices, it may take more time to complete inventory cycle. On completion you will see the devices on which hardware inventory cycle ran successfully. If the device is offline, it shows up as unsuccessful.

On the client machine, open the InventoryAgent.log file using cmtrace tool. You should see something as shown below. Note that first inventory data that the client returns is always a full inventory. Subsequent inventory information contains only delta inventory information.